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AN 




INAUGUBAL ADDEESS, 




MARVIN R.^VINCENT, A. M., 




Prof, of the Latin Language and Literature in Troy 




University, 




JULY 21st., 1859. 




* TEOY, N. Y.: 




A. W. SCRIBNER AND CO., BOOK, CARD AND JOB PRINTERS, CANNON PLACE. 




1859. 


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INAUGURAL ADDRESS, 



MARVIN R. VINCENT, A. M., 



Prof, of the Latin, Language and ; Literature in Troy 
University, 



JULY 2 1st., 1859. 






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$ TROY, K Y. : 

A. W. SCRIBNER AND CO., BOOK, CARD AND JOB PRINTEPS, CANNON PLACE. 

1859. 



ADDRESS 



In comparing my position on the present occasion with 
that of my Colleagues who have already addressed you, — 
I cannot but regard it as a misfortune that I alone am 
compelled to bear the burden of Antiquity. I am well 
aware that he who comes before an American audience 
as the exponent of the "dead languages," — is liable, at 
the outset, to forfeit their sympathy; for though we affect, 
in these days, a partiality for antique models, and refer to 
the Goths for our churches and to the Greeks for our 
public edifices, and rummage the antiquarian catalogues 
for rare old books to fill our libraries, — the sentiment of 
reverence for age may be said in more senses than one, 
to be daily becoming feebler among us ; and he therefore 
who comes up from the tombs of buried thoughts and 
words, and would unfold the lessons which they teach, is 
likely to find his offering slighted for that of those who 
deal in present realities and practical truths. For our age 
lives eminently in the present; and with subjects of this 
nature my colleagues have already come to you, I 
ought not therefore to be surprised if you hasten from 
the land of shadow in which for a time it will be my duty 
to detain you, — and from the companionship of humanity 
in its childhood, to commune with those who can answer 
the demands of an age satisfied with nothing short of 
demonstration by figures, which will not because they 
cannot lie : who can belt the fertile hills with iron bands, 



span the rivers with sweeping arches, or "put a girdle 
round the earth in forty minutes;" bringing star-eyed 
science down into intimate and beautiful relations with 
the minutest truths of every-day life, — showing how every 
nodding wheat-field may say to your bones " ye are my 
brothers" and how the merry songster which hums in 
your teakettles over the evening fire, swells with huge 
ideas of lifting weights, driving steamers, and tunneling 
mountains. 

The delicacy of this position is enhanced by the fact 
that modern Utilitarianism has set natural science in 
array against the class of studies which it is my duty to 
represent. Forgetting that the laws of harmony and 
mutual dependence prevail in the realm of knowledge as 
of nature, and that no single science stands, or can stand 
criticizing its fellows as they pass, but falls naturally and 
beautifully into its place in the great circle, sweeping- 
round forever under the guidance of inflexible law, and 
showing ofttimes by its very aberrations the existence of 
some unseen, attractive power beyond, in the develope- 
ment of which the human mind may exercise its energies 
and grow strong by struggling ; — it thus arises that the 
classics and natural sciences, especially the mathematics, 
have been constituted representatives each of a distinct 
mode of training; the exponents of two widely different 
views of mental culture; the one objective, looking straight 
from cause to effect, regarding the mind as an engine of 
power in proportion as to its ability to coin so many dollars 
per day, — the other subjective, not ignoring, but embracing 
the narrower view, and finding the perfection of all life, 
physical and intellectual, in the symmetrical outworking 
of a Divine ideal. 

It is not my purpose, nor is it necessary here to discuss 
the soundness of the position which makes the two bran- 
ches referred to representative. It is enough that I 
claim for the classics their appropriate place in the 
circle of the sciences ; assuming as the end in view that 



manv-sided developement which we term "education." 
My object, therefore, is merely to lay before you a few 
thoughts which may serve to define more accurately the 
position of the classics in the educational scheme as "un- 
folding at present in our own society. 

We are presented, in this country, with those general 
phases which appear in the history of every growing 
people. An infant nation's earliest life is physical, not 
intellectual. The men who, with compass and symbol 
demonstrate the existence of a new continent, may pursue 
their researches in well^stored libraries, and amid the 
appliances of luxury ; but linguists and historians may 
not guide the straining vessel through the waves of hith- 
erto unfurrowed seas, or poets and painters cut down 
forests, swim rivers, hew out log cabins, or expel savages. 
The axe and the rifle have here, as elsewhere played their 
appointed part as the pioneers of the district school and 
the college. Log walls, decked with the trophies of the 
chase have preceded frescoed Ceilings and copies from the 
old masters, and good and true citizens have been trained 
beneath the open heaven, ere statesmen have stepped forth 
armed with College lore, or scholars stirred the hearts of 
a hemisphere with the children of their vigils. 

You will readily perceive the evil which is the natural 
outgrowth from this stock, and with which liberal education 
everywhere initiates her conflicts. Success in overcoming 
the constant opposition afforded by nature, calls into action 
a sj stem of purely practical mental habits ; a custom of 
looking in a direct line from an obvious cause to a speedy 
and well defined effect ; a spirit which has already stamped 
itself deeply upon the nation, and evolved itself into that 
Briarean business life which is at once our pride and our 
disgrace. Hence the continual outcry of the public press 
for what it is pleased to call u practical education." Hence 
the unremitting attacks upon Colleges and Universities. 
Hence the cry "Give us something to learn of which the 
bearing upon our future lives shall be evident and palpa-- 



6 

ble." Throw' away your Latin and Greek, your Philos- 
ophy and Metaphysics; or at least abandon them to Doc- 
tors, Theologians and Pedagogues. "Away with them, 
crucify them! " 

These considerations become important to us in view 
of our standing just at the turning point of public sen- 
timent on this subject. Strongly as the tide has been 
running, an under-current has gradually set in the other 
direction. Men are beginning to awake to the fact that 
their unprecedented material prosperity requires an impor- 
tant element to complete it ; to institute comparisons with 
older nations on some other grounds than the extent of 
territory or the amount of resources; to see that the only 
edncational policy to which, nationally, we stand com- 
mitted, is far too limited to meet the higher demands 
whose number and importunity daily increases; and to 
seek not only the -means of education, but also, what edu- 
cation means. 

To exhibit the superficiality of the common definition 
of the word practiced, to show that the best practical men 
are not trained on the principle on which an American 
rail road is built, i. e. by the shortest and cheapest route ; 
to prove that there is a vast practical power acquired in 
the mastery of those studies in which as in the classics 
w r e walk by faith and not by sight, as well as in what the 
Germans have sarcastically denominated " the Bread and 
Butter Sciences" — to aid in making men not machines, — 
all are embraced in the work mapped out for our classical 
schools. May we not, therefore, with profit, examine 
some of the great practical truths which open to us in the 
study of language ? 

The etymology of two classical terms signifying " to 
speak," opens to us a beautiful view of the dignity attach- 
ing to language. Far back in the language of ancient 
India, they connect with a root meaning "to shine," and 
embracing, at the same time, the name of the great Source 
and Dispenser of light. Thus, through the power of 



speech, man becomes " the man i fester ; " tlius allied to 
Deity; receiving light from the great Dispenser, and, 
through speech, shining in his turn upon the world, which 
bows before his reflected radiance, and confesses that he 
hath indeed been made "but a little lower than the 
Angels." The same acknowledgment of the dignity of 
speech is manifest in the combinations of the words re- 
ferred to. The language of Nature ever selects as an 
appellative that which sets forth the most prominent char- 
acteristic of the object, whether power or weakness. And 
so, from the whole number of infirmities which make up 
man's embryo existence and give him during that period 
a claim on human sympathy and protection,— the want 
of speech is selected as the expression of that existence ; 
he is the "infans" the " infant" the u non -speaker." 

A mighty truth, requiring only observation to confirm 
it, opens directly from this; to wit,- that the whole history 
of man as a social being is a series of efforts at self-expres- 
sion. " The human mind," says Mr. Donaldson, one of the 
leading philologists of England, " is naturally impatient of 
pure thought. It strives ever after objectivity ; and en- 
deavors to complete and fix its inward conceptions by some 
species or other of outward manifestation. The thought 
completes itself in the expression." I say only observa- 
tion is required to confirm this truth. It may be traced, 
not only in the thousand forms of speech on whose wings 
the thoughts of the world, their loves and hatreds, their 
truths and falsehoods fly on their several missions of joy 
and sorrow ; nor yet alone in the garnered treasures of 
libraries ; — the musty roll and ponderous tome. There 
were stories written, — stories of power and conquest over 
man and nature, stories of man's own pride and the de- 
gree of his self-esteem, long ere the roll and reed secured 
them for the eyes of generations to come. The massive 
monuments which loom up in the morning twilight of 
time, the cities whose marred memorials set chronology 
at defiance and rear their time-stricken heads to laugh 

o 



at Time as lie passes by, — Baalbec with massy temple 
columns still paying stern adoration to the sun, mute 
worshippers, alone left to tell of the throngs which, far 
back in the centuries, crowded his shrine, — the mound on 
the Tigris, which for years kept its secret so well, but 
which, smitten by the rod of science, opened to the as- 
tonished gaze of a waiting age, a tomb of kings and a 
sepulchre of empire, with the history of a buried race pain- 
ted on its walls and its saloons ringed with the embodi- 
ments of its colossal imaginings, — Egypt with its tombs 
and labyrinths, its obelisks and avenues of sphinxes, 
Karnak, Philae and Ghizeh, — all mirror the same great 
fact that man has ceaselessly aimed to tell his conceptions 
of the world around him and the impress he has made 
upon it, not merely to his companions of a day or year, 
but so to embody them that the coming ages should turn 
their heads and pay him homage. And herein has he 
shown his recognition of the truth that it is the express- 
ive power alone which links him to the future as well 
as to the present, and furnishes him, as men say, the key 
to immortality. 

The progress of science, strangely enough, has illustra- 
ted the same thought. For science, in invading the realm 
of the abstract, has been compelled long since to have 
recourse to the aid of that which is so often arrayed 
against her : and the effort to symbolize such ideas as 
time, space, motion, continuity, — intuitions which, like a 
Proteus, evaded the grasp of expression, made the solu- 
tion of a philological difficulty the test question of a new 
era in science and philosophy.- 

The same image and superscription is stamped upon 
the ordinary interchanges of thought in business, domes- 
tic and political life. Place man in solitude ; and restless 
and unhappy, he frets at the reiterated claim of his inner 
nature which forbids the retention of what his own imag- 
ination creates, and demands of him not merely the 
reception of what he sees in man and nature, but its 



9 

reproduction in new relations under the light of his own 
understanding, — speech to express and complete the 
thought, and some other human soul as a tablet for its 
reception. And so in the more complicated relations 
which the developement of society presents. Every mem. 
ber, whatever may be his characteristics, or however 
intrinsically he may differ from each and every other 
member, — if he be true to the- promptings . of his own 
nature, cannot fail to bring to bear on that body with 
which he connects himself, the actual amount of powe 
involved in his conceptions of existing facts and their 
relations. Hence it is not altogether the love of popular 
applause, or the promptings of pure patriotism, or the 
consciousness of impending national danger which calls 
the orator to the rostra, and draws from him " thoughts 
that breathe and words that burn ; " — but a more deeply 
significant fact, underlying and embracing all these, that, 
wherever an earnest-hearted man thinks, be the impulse 
what it may, his inner self demands the use of his tongue 
or pen. 

Thus, whether communicatino- in a few T articulate sounds 
his few and simple wants, rearing huge masses of stone 
to express his contempt for the powers of this world or 
his reverence for those of another, building pyramids or 
painting walls, embodying the rude traditions of his 
ancestors in ruder verse that pleases his unaccustomed 
ear, and relieves his unpractised memory, or adding his 
tribute to the flood tide of an opulent literature, — his 
effort at expression in some form or other, upheaves itself 
like some mighty geological stratum ; while the very 
longing for objectivity which prompts expression leads 
him, at least in the earlier stages of his history, to rever- 
ence in language the distinguishing seal of man's nobility m 
As we cannot fail to recognize the fact, neither can we 
fail, with our brothers of the past to render homage to 
man the speaker, as the necessary complement of man the 
thinker. And as we are necessitated to call him morally 



10 

best who most successfully brings to bear upon his fellows 
the promptings of a noble nature, who best expresses by 
living every pure sentiment and generous impulse, — or as 
we acknowledge the influence of the man of strict busi- 
ness habits, in proportion as his seal is set upon such an 
amount of exchangeable media, — shall we not also ac- 
knowledge the intellectual kinghood of the man who, 
through the God-like gift of speech, vocal or written, most 
fully, deeply and permanently expresses his mind upon 
the world of mind around him. 

The acquisition of a language among those who form 
and speak it, is a mere practical process, pursued, in all 
cases, with a view to the necessities of life, and in the ma- 
jority of instances with no other object. To those, 
however, who study it as we study the Latin and Greek 
tongues, it becomes, though to some extent a desirable 
end in itself, chiefly a means in education. And I make 
this remark, simple as it may seem, because, even at this 
day, a most singular misunderstanding seems to prevail, 
which finds vent in the very common remark " Of what 
use are they ? You will never speak, nor in all probabil- 
ity write them." I do not propose to enter at present upon 
the discussion of the value of these studies as an end 
simply ; though even this view of the question opens a 
broad vista of thought, and it would be easy to show that 
to him who seeks the evolution of power in literature, 
that of the ancients will furnish athletes with whom, 
he may exercise his brawniest mental sinews, and food for 
his tenderest sensibilities. 

But as a means of arriving at the principles of language 
as a science, of laying bare the great laws which underlie 
not one speech simply, but every conceivable form of 
speech, — as throwing a flood of light upon whatever path 
the student may hereafter pursue, as the only means of 
fully exhibiting antiquity, and bringing him into inti- 
mate contact with the men and minds of the past, as 
opening to him innumerable new sources of thought, ex- 



11 

tending the scope of his ideas and the range of his 
researches, — in a thousand instances which might be 
named, the study of language vindicates itself as one of 
the great living agents in education. "It is a mistake," 
says Dr. Jelf, "into which none but shallow minds can 
fall, to speak lightly of an acquaintance with the accura- 
cies of Grammar and Etymology, or to profess to find the 
classics useful only for the matter which they contain. I 
am persuaded that to such persons a great part of the 
value of the classics as instruments of education is lost; 
for surely it is better to learn to think as the ancients 
thought, than merely to know what they thought. So it 
would be better to be able to paint as Eaphael, than to 
copy, ever so accurately, the Madonna. Nor, as it seems 
to me, do such persons realize the full value of the mat- 
ter; for the connection between thought and language is, 
from the very nature and relation of each, so intimate, 
that it is impossible but that as a person makes himself 
better acquainted with the proportions, so to say, of lan- 
guage, he makes himself more master of the mysteries of 
human thought in general, and of the tone and feeling of 
the nation or man whose inmost mind he thus reads in the 
forms and idioms of their speech." 

We may, it is true, read of antiquity in History, but 
History herself cannot read antiquity save in the spirit of 
its language. Character may be delineated as vividly as 
words can paint it; but after all, "we see only the side 
which the artist chooses to represent ;" and the difference 
is as between seeing painted on a wall of Nineveh the de- 
tails of a siege ~or triumphal procession, and beholding the 
living warriors, with muscles knotted, and brows knit in 
the agony of the conflict, or passing proudly before us, 
decked in flowing purple and gold. 

Going beneath the syntactical net- work wherein nature 
and art blend in such beautiful proportions, exhibiting 
how language, in becoming less true to nature, has become 
idealized and more purely intellectual, yet unable totally 



12 

to master the workings of impulse and passion,— furnishing 
no contemptible mental discipline in the analysis of the 
laws of its structure and in showing by analogies of men- 
tal phenomena how, grouping itself round certain salient 
points, it has crystallized into the myriad, complex forms 
of grace and beauty in which literature presents it, — going 
beneath all this, we are brought into contact with the liv- 
ing ivords ; not simply names for conceptions, but direct 
evolutions of the conceptions themselves. And if, as 
humble students, we enter this mine of truth, with lamps 
trimmed and burning and eyes opened to behold and 
profit by the wonders of the place, we shall be constrained 
to linger long, and ever to love and search for words as 
for hidden treasure. For in every winding path of hu- 
man history which traverses this domain, these gems 
spangle the w T alls of human experience that enclose it- 
On the floors we tread them beneath our feet, wrapped 
from sight amid accumulated rubbish, unless perchance 
some sparkling point reveal the existence of the treasure. 
Some large, clear, transparent, others many-sided, fringed 
with points of light; each motion tinging each transmitted 
ray with the richest hues: from walls and roof shoot 
glorious stalactites wrought by the slow droppings of cen- 
turies into shapes varied, beautiful and fantastic, springing 
boldly from distinct roots and struggling toward each 
other as they descend, until they hang frozen into one 
blended mass of translucent beauty. Some. bedded thickly 
and closely in every passage and chamber ; others lying 
far back in the innermost deeps, where the darkness is 
thick, and the fossils of ages long gone strew the floor. 
Truly he who once finds where these treasures lie hidden, 
will soon " sell all that he may buy this field ;" and in the 
words of Trench, " great will be our gains if, having 
these treasures of wisdom and knowledge lying round 
about us, — we determine that we will make what portion 
of them we can our own ; that we will ask the words we 
use to give an account of themselves, to say whence they 



13 

are and whither they tend. Then shall we often rub off 
the dast and rust from what seemed but a common token, 
which we had taken and given a thousand times, esteem- 
ing it no better, but which now we shall perceive, to be a 
precious coin, bearing the image and superscription of the 
great King: then shall we often stand in surprise and in 
something of shame, while we behold the great spiritual 
realities which underlie our common speech, — the mar- 
vellous truths which we have been witnessing for in our 
words, but, it may be, witnessing against in our lives." 

These are the only tracks by which the footsteps of a 
lost people, scattered by convulsion within, or pushed 
forward by pressure from without, can be retraced and 
distinguished amid the millions of " footprints on the 
sands of time ; " — the fountains that break through the 
debris of ages, at rare intervals it is true, but sufficient 
nevertheless to allow us to trace back the rill to the 
great national fountain-head. Drifting here and there in 
foreign tongues, enwrapped in strange combinations, dis- 
guised by prefixes and terminations, they tell of conquest 
when no line on stone or parchment exists to recount 
what banners flaunted or what warriors grappled in con- 
flict ; — how predatory mountain bands overwhelmed a race 
of simple shepherds, or some cultivated and intellectual 
race absorbed within itself a handful of scattered tribes ; 
and ever, as we combine these memorials, stronger and 
clearer loom up afar in the mist of early time, those mys- 
terious mother nations, whose "line has gone out to all the 
earth, and their words to the end of the world." 

We may, at this point, follow out a practical suggestion 
which can scarcely escape us in bringing this theme to 
bear upon the facts of the present. In the prevalence 
of the spirit of hostility toward the study of the lan- 
guages, our theory and practice are essentially contradictory. 
No people aim so exclusively as we at the great end of lin- 
guistic study, — expression. American life is essentially 
diffusive. Not even the large admixture of caution, 



14 

shrewdness, keenness, or whatever name may be given it, 
which enters into the composition of a genuine American, 
is sufficient to keep him from so far disclosing himself 
even to a stranger, as to induce him, if possible, to believe 
that within his own cranium there is an exhaustless fund 
of original genius which, like the venerable Father of His- 
tory, he could unfold if he would. No Yankee can sit in 
a public place for five consecutive minutes, without exer- 
cising his jackknife, and exhibiting his familiarity with 
that portion of the alphabet embraced in his own name, 
by carving the same in staring characters upon the first 
available tree, bench or house-side. We print books by 
the hundred thousand, and issue as many newspapers as 
the rest of the world together ; yet we have no literature. 
Our very conceit ministers to this desire, and impels us to 
leave our impress, personal, material or intellectual upon 
everything with which we come into contact. Not a 
youth who, on the sanded floor of the academy, makes 
the old walls ring on a Saturday morning with "The boy 
stood on the burning deck" or " On Linden when the sun 
was low," — but is fully convinced in the depths of his heart 
and brain that Washington is, at no late day, to be stunned 
into admiration with his eloquence, and that the ghost of 
Daniel Webster will follow his career of stumping as as- 
siduously as " the morning drum-beat" does the sun. 
And, jesting aside, there is a question of no little impor- 
tance growing out of this, which concerns us even more 
nearly than it did Eome or Athens. With those nations, 
especially the latter, wherein a strong national bias lay in 
the direction of liberal culture, there was an offset to the 
influence assigned the public harangue, in the equally im- 
portant fact that this social bias demanded of him who 
assumed the orator's duty, a liberality and finish of culti- 
vation corresponding in no small degree to the magnitude 
of the responsibility. The infatuation of Athens in her 
dealings with the great Macedonian, assume a less excusa- 
ble aspect when studied in connection with the public 



15 

efforts of Demosthenes, the pupil of Isoerates, Isaeus and 
Plato, the imitator of T hue j elides, the rival of Aeschines; 
and Rome, who trained her best orators for the forum with 
no less severity than she drilled her legions for the field, 
might well be pardoned if enthusiasm sometimes decided 
what was deserving of more lengthened deliberation, when 
Cicero ruled the rostra, whose vanity was only equaled by 
his eloquence, — his vacillation by the extent of his attain- 
ments, and who has left us in his own elaborate treatise 
his high ideal of the complete orator, — " vis oratoris, 
professioque ipsa bene dicendi, hoc suscipere, ac polliceri 
videtur ; ut omni de re, quaecunque sit proposita, ornate 
ab eo, copioseque dicatur." But among us the bias lies 
rather in the opposite direction ; and into our midst who- 
soever will may come, and without difficulty gather a 
gaping, wondering multitude, who will laugh at his slang 
as the essence of wit, throw up their hats at his low per- 
sonal abuse as a model of oratorical satire, and shout 
themselves hoarse, when, under the combined influence of 
association and whiskey, he becomes eloquent i. e. unin- 
telligible. True, this is one of the extremes. We can lay 
claim to more respectable displays; yet the typical fact 
remains the same. We are most powerfully swayed by 
public speakers. A large proportion of men get not only 
their ideas but their language from the public journals, 
where from the very haste required in the issue, the style 
becomes anything but a model, and the employment of 
words to a great extent indiscriminate. The peculiar use, 
even pronunciation of a word by any favorite orator, 
carries it, in a short time, bodily into the vocabulary of 
every citizen. Who will say that, in a state of society in 
which oratorical display affords the surest guarantee of 
popularity, and the straightest path to influence, when a 
whole people stand before these oracles with as much rev- 
erence and as much gullibility as ever Greek waited at 
the shrine of the Pythoness, and bend before his words like 
the tall grass of the prairies which a spark may wrap in a 



16 

blaze, — who will say that the fountain-head needs not 
purging, and that some power should not be set walking 
up and down the land that may give back to language 
the truth and purity which are its native attributes, thus 
wresting it to holier purposes, and ensuring it nobler 
triumphs. 

Truth of expression is a prime necessity to truth of 
thought. We have a faith, in words which, exercised in 
other directions, would remove mountains, and which 
speedily reconciles us to any garb they may assume in 
our presence. " Words," says Fichte, "as commonly em- 
ployed, form a clouddand of half-understood presenta- 
tions; in which the common consciousness, even of so 
called educated men lives, and lohich is their truth. 11 To 
those only who are wont to view them as invested with 
more than a merely nominal power, is their sacredness 
manifest. In their infancy they open frankly upon us 
their eyes, through which shines clearly their inner life : 
but .as time calls them into action, little by little, at the 
requirements of a new custom, by a gradual attraction 
to the companionship of congenial neighbors, by a false 
shame, the offspring of a refinement, — they draw imper- 
ceptibly from the side of the mother thought, or car- 
ried away bodily like the Sabine virgins of old, are 
forced to colonize some new ideal field, and assimilate 
themselves to new associations as best they may. I am 
aware that we cannot always be strictly consistent even 
here. Changes of this nature seem, to some extent, in- 
volved in the laws of social progress and the increasing 
refinement of literary taste. Any man, for instance, 
would be stared at, who should express the reception of 
an insult by saying he had been jumped upon. If Mrs. 
Jellyby, in the excess of her devotion to the pagans of 
Borrioboola Grha, should send out appeals for villagers, 
her success would be at least questionable. We speak 
with as much indifference of a quarantine of five or six 
days, as Homer's heroes did of a hecatomb of twelve 
oxen; and we never state our conviction of man's sin- 



17 

cerity, by asserting that he is unwaxed. But it is at least in 
our power to get into our hands the clew which runs back 
through these windings. It is possible for us to oppose 
the use of words expressing ideas of power, grandeur, or 
transcendent excellence, in such familiar and false con- 
nections as will soon deprive them of all their intrinsic 
force. It is possible to prevent the destruction in our 
language of all claim to accuracy, by preventing this 
wholesale annihilation of distinctions. It is possible for 
us to cease these unintentional falsehoods which interlard 
our daily conversation. And that man who shall buckle 
on the armour to do battle in this field, shall find not his 
least reward in that he grows daily more jealous for truth, 
as well as more accurate in the expression of thought, 
and more keen in the detection of error. 

It is time that we pass to a brief consideration of a 
question which has probably been asked already. Hav- 
ing endeavored to set forth, language as a necessity to the 
completion of the distinction between man and brute, to 
show man's recognition of the fact developed in his efforts 
at expression, — that the success and completeness of his 
education is measured by his power of successful and 
permanent expression, — -that the study of language thus 
becomes indispensable to his perfect moulding as scholar 
and man, — the question will naturally arise why the dead 
languages must be charged with so heavy a burden in the 
educational scheme. 

A wide subject is here opened; but we must be con- 
tent to view it from one point only. We have developed 
the idea that the mind strives after objectivity. Parallel 
with this and equally true is the fact that, in a large class 
of instances, the process must be inverted, and the mind 
receive certain impressions from without before it can pro- 
ceed to give shape and symmetry to its inward concep- 
tions. We do not expect the student to evolve, for in- 
stance, the great principles of numbers, and follow them 
out in their various relations, until we have given him a 



18 

" whereon to stand;" — certain facts, arbitrary if you will, 
which require, isolated, only an exercise of perception and 
faith ; and begin to call out the reasoning power with the 
moment of their first and simplest combination, until, so 
fully master of these as to apprehend their relations at a 
glance, the mind begins to group them in new combina- 
tions and deduce new results ; sweeps among the stars at 
will, or unaided, sustains itself in the measureless depths 
of infinite space. Archimedes engaged to move the 
world ; but the prime condition was that a stand-point should 
be given him so that he might work toivard not from it. 
This general principle may therefore be stated as peculiar 
to those studies whose office it is simply to train the mind 
for independent action hereafter, — they are to be pursued 
for the most part ab extra] so that the remark is in every 
sense true that "though the method of language is inde- 
pendent of any particular language, yet like every other 
science, it must have its facts as well as its laws." 

Now we must obviously not search for these in the ever 
shifting forms and fleeting idioms of modern speech. 
Fixedness is essential to constitute a model. The Ger- 
man, so copious in literature, so opulent in words, from 
its power of absorption and facility of combination draw- 
ing within its charmed circle whatever in other tongues 
may contribute to the fuller expression of its wealth of 
thought, classical, scientific, metaphysical, — how shall we 
chain this Leviathan long enough to daguerreotype his 
huge proportions ? The same remark will apply to every 
living language ; but not so with the classics. Still lie 
before us in statue-like perfection and repose those won- 
derful national elements which, gathering themselves up 
into gigantic forms of life on the plains of Central Asia, 
projected their shadow upon the two peninsulas which 
reach out into the Mediterranean as landmarks for the 
ages. Which, on the soil of Hellas, worked themselves 
out in the manifold types of a race for whose equals, 
intellectually, the world will long seek in vain; — the 



19 

stern, energetic, practical Spartan, the refined and brilliant 
Athenian, the enterprising and versatile Ionian ; that 
moulded as well the heroes of Marathon, Lenctra and 
Thermopylae, as the oracles of the Pnqx, or the cham- 
pions of the subtlest philosophies ; that crystallized into 
superhuman beauty in Athens, which 

" Gleamed with its crest of columns on the will 
Of man as on a mount of diamond set," 

and darted their vivid rays through every word of a lan- 
guage fresh, warm and transparent, harmonious in struc- 
ture and flexible to the touch of every thought which the 
subtlest reason could invent or the warmest inspiration 
strike out. Like the stream of Arethusa, preserving intact 
its native purity as it glided among the nations, — it welled 
up in all its original, sparkling splendor wherever it found 
a resting place ; marking the successive stages of its 
developement, nay, even of its decline, by no violent 
transitions or gaping chasms, but melting from one to 
another, as blend the tints of the rainbow. Vigorous in 
action yet delicate in constitution. Thriving in the im- 
mediate presence of the Greek intellect, yet pining when 
removed, and showing its intrinsic individuality by the 
tenacity with which it clung to the type of mind which 
had generated it. Before the eyes of him who, turning 
his back upon the strife and bustle of the present, looks 
down into the unbroken stillness of these ages, what a 
glorious procession passes. Homer, singing before sunlight 
in the morning of time, 

" with broad suspense 
Of thunderous brows, and lips intense, 
Of garrulous God-innocence." 

Hesiod, calm, simple, melancholy, didactic, whispering 
ever as he walks the fields, of the anger of Heaven, of 
human trial and human sorrow ; — Anacreon and Sappho 
with brows circled with vineleaves, and hands full of 
purple clusters swelling with the drops of passion. Hero- 
dotus, with well worn staff, and sandals stained with the 



20 

dust of travel, pouring out with the simple garrulity of 
age the wonders of his journey ings, — overflowing with 
quaint legend, bold portraiture and pithy aphorism. 

— " bold 
Electric Pindar, quick as fear, 
With race-dust on his cheeks, and clear, 
Slant-startled eyes that seemed to hear 
The chariot rounding the last goal, 
To hurtle past it in his soul." 

The noble band of the philosophers, high-browed and 
calm, with deep, earnest eyes, ever seeking to pierce the 
infinite and commune with Nature's secrets. Aeschylus, 
grand as the pyramids, and permeated with the deep, 
solemn passion which stands out in drops of godlike 
agony on the Prometheus, or strides with the terrific earn- 
estness of superhuman vengeance through the Agamem- 
non. Sophocles, with eyes ever upraised to Heaven, and 
ears alert to catch the solemn footfalls of destiny, — serene 
where Aeschylus is awful, content to leave tortured demi- 
gods and remorseless furies, for the interchange of human 
sympathies and the common affections of the race. Not 
admitted, like him, to the table of the gods, but ever, 
like a sweet temple-bell ringing down the years and call- 
ing to worship. The profound, truthful, concise, passion- 
less Thucydides ; the graceful and sparkling Xenophon; 
Demosthenes, rapid, vehement, harmonious; — Isocrates 
flowing ever on and on in measured cadences like the 
long swell of a summer sea ; — Aeschines, elegant, insinu- 
ating, artful; and Plato, "among whose venerable works," 
to use the words of another, " we may stand as in a vast 
and consecrated fabric, vistas and aisles of thought open- 
ing on every side, high thoughts that raise the mind to 
heaven, pillars and niches, cells within cells, mixing in 
seeming confusion, and a veil of tracery and foliage, and 
grotesque imagery thrown over all; but all rich with a 
light streaming through dim religious forms, — all leading 
up to God, all blessed with an effluence from Him, though 



21 

an effluence dimmed and half lost in the contaminated 
reason of man." 

The same elements under different phases, still heave 
their remains above the soil of Italy, centralizing in that 
city which could be content with no other name than 
" power " itself. Grand and colossal in its outlines, de- 
veloping even in the myths which lie at the portals of its 
history that rude power which made it, in after years, the 
sole representative of universal dominion, — exercising 
like an infant Hercules its youthful limbs with struggle, 
until, like the immovable bulwark of granite, which, on 
its southern frontier bids defiance to the sea, it dashed off 
from it the various national inundations which in succes- 
sion swept over the peninsula ; — fond of action rather than 
of repose, exhibiting much of the vitality which charac- 
terized the Grecian intellect, yet uninformed by a taste so 
high and pure ; — reverencing law as religion, stern and 
unyielding beyond nature, yet immoderate in indulgence 
as in self-denial ; — commending and honoring individual 
integrity, yet ignoring good faith as a nation ; — less inde- 
pendent in arts than in arms, willing that her sisters across 
the Ionian should furnish her with models of taste, the 
elements of her philosophies, and even the attributes of 
her gods, if she might set her foot upon their necks and 
lead their kings in triumph at her chariot- wheels. Ex- 
hibiting in her political history an ever increasing hatred 
of aristocracy, and a continued social struggle for the 
maintenance of popular privileges, yet a unit in that 
arrogance which acknowledged no equal, and made even 
conquest more galling. Vigorous in its national life 
prompt and practical in devising and carrying out schemes 
for its support, undaunted by failure and strengthened by 
opposition, it well warranted Horace's eulogium 

" Duris ut ilex tonsa bipennibus, 
Nigrae feraci frondis in Algido, 
Per damna, per caedes, ab ipso 
Ducit opes animumque ferro." 



22 

From such characteristics the language was a natural 
outgrowth. Not flexible and graceful like its sister tongue, 
but hard and glistening under polish. A language of art 
rather than of nature. " Fit for embodying and express- 
ing the thoughts of an active and practical, but not of an 
imaginative and speculative people." Full of energy and 
vigor, yet inferior to the Greek in permanency and vital- 
ity. Dealing with other tongues as its nation dealt with 
other nations ; forming no alliances, but conquering; yet 
disclosing a vital weakness by its inability to escape a 
thorough remoulding by the nation whose prosperity 
Koman arrogance could ill endure, — or to prevent its 
literature from becoming a reflection of the Greek. Yet 
we still laugh at the broad humor, sparkling raillery, and 
ingenious intrigue of Plautus, and the refined wit of 
Terence. Lucretius yet towers in serene majesty like 
some cold mountain, leaning its snow tipped crest against 
the hard blue sky of winter, alone in his godlessness. Still 
in Virgil's verse hum the bees, and streams run laughing 
down the rocks, and the pelting hail rattles on the farm- 
houses; and again awake the pulses of the epic that 
throbbed in the story of Troy, and the tale of the much 
enduring Ulysses. Horace, graceful, witty, sententious, 
careless, sarcastic, now portraying, half laughing, half 
earnest, some social absurdity, now wreaking vengeance 
on some poetical quack, or compounding a bitter pill for 
a disappointed office-seeker ; — anon framing with careless 
fingers verses that rollick and reel with Falernian, and 
again rising full plumed in noblest flights of lyric song ; — 
Cicero, orator, poet, philosopher, equally in his element 
whether goading a Catiline orVerres, or, amid the shades 
of his beloved Tusculum unfolding the principles of 
Grecian philosophies ; — Livy and Tacitus with pictured 
scrolls; Juvenal and Persiaus lashing with bitter wrath 
and keen satire the vices swept in from the East, — all are 
ours still, to compare, to study, to imitate ; — Greece and 
Rome, language, institutions, laws, the past has left us as 



23 

a legacy. As they live in their language and literature, 
they are beyond the reach of change. 

" Within the surface of Time's fleeting river, 
Their wrinkled image lies as then it lay, — 

Immovably unquiet ; — and forever 
It trembles, but it cannot pass away. 

If these views of the study of language be correct, 
surely it will not be strange if, on assuming the duties of 
this chair, I enter "upon them under no small sense of 
responsibility. And yet I must confess that, in the popu- 
lar view, which makes the classics representative of the 
system of liberal education, I cannot but rejoice that it 
has fallen to my lot to enter the lists with the champions 
of language. A few practical considerations which the 
subject and occasion seem to demand, and I have done. 

The prosecution of these studies as it should be carried 
on during the earlier years of a college course, is justly 
viewed (in connection with other branches) as preparing 
the mind for the studies of the latter years, in which the 
pupil will be thrown more entirely upon his own mental 
resources, and introduced to inductive methods of study. 
Yet we cannot shut our eyes to the consideration that the 
national spirit of haste still pervades our educational as it 
does our social system. Two years, in the average of 
cases, suffice to read (?) the requisite amount of Latin and 
Greek prescribed by the college authorities, and the stu- 
dent enters college forthwith. 

The consequence of this haste is, first, that the pupil is 
compelled to learn, and the Professor to teach what should 
have been thoroughly taught in the Academy or High 
School, and to spend one or even two years in mastering 
details of Etymology, Syntax and Prosody, without which 
he ought never to have been admitted to College ; so that 
as a consequence, he does not acquire the basis actually 
demanded to enable him to pursue successfully the studies 
of the two latter years. 






24 

Now one of three things is certain. Either the time spent 
in College is too short, the time spent in preparation for 
College is not long enough, or the training afforded by the 
preparatory schools is not thorough enough. And I do 
not hesitate to express my conviction that, until our Col- 
leges unite in requiring as a qualification for admission 
to the classical course, at least as much actual knowledge 
as many of them succeed in conferring at the end of two 
years, — and in positively refusing to admit any student 
who has not acquired a practical familiarity with the entire 
ground-work of the two languages, — not until then will 
either these schools or colleges be doing the work wliich 
their position as representatives of liberal education ren- 
ders binding upon them, — or our classical training be freed 
from the stigma of superficiality which at present it so 
richly deserves. The students of the great training schools 
of England, — Eton, Harrow, Bury, Eugby, — would throw 
completely in the shade most of our college graduates and 
not a few teacherSj by the ease with which they dispose of 
linguistic difficulties which seem mountains to our young 
classicists. The graduates of the German Gymnasia which, 
ought to answer to our high schools, but are more nearly 
akin to the colleges, — ; not content witli stumbling through 
a few pages of a Latin classic, blasting out the difficulties 
with Lexicon and Grammar, — read, write, and speak the 
language with the utmost ease. And there is no conceiv- 
able reason why we should not attain the same standard. 
Surely, whatever in our scheme of education is worth 
learning at all, is worth learning well. But, if we would 
have thorough classical teachers for our schools, we must 
train thorough classical scholars in our schools. The truth 
is, much of the prevalent indisposition to the study of the 
languages is owing to the fact that the students are, in 
the majority of instances, left pretty much to themselves. 
Truly I have sometimes wondered as I have sat listening 
to a recitation consisting of a slip-shod translation inter- 
spersed with a scattering of questions selected principally 



25 

because the teacher happened to know the answers, — that 
the ghosts of the ancients did not rise en masse and re- 
proach him, not only for the abominable perversions of 
their ideas and language, but for his positive failure to 
go beneath the shell of words, and bring forth the power 
and beauty with which they are so richly fraught. I do 
not wonder that the large proportion of quondam classical 
students have learned to look upon a Greek or Latin 
Grammar with a shudder of horror ; and that the old 
Xenophon, Livy, Horace and Homer are stowed away in 
some lumber room, and abandoned to the companionship 
of mice and spiders, — when, after having plodded drearily 
through the desert of nouns, verbs, pronouns and syntac- 
tical rules, times without number in the attempt to commit 
the whole to memory,, they entered upon the history of 
Caesar's exploits with a restless desire of kicking Caesar 
for having dared to write commentaries, or wandered like 
the very ghosts themselves along the banks of Virgil's 
Styx, beholding a Charon in the pedagogue, and beyond 
the stream 

"No light, but rather darkness visible." 

Shame on such instructors who go down into the tombs 
of buried thoughts and wordslike some mould}^ sexton, only 
to rummage for an hour among the dry bones and coffins. 
and haul out a subject for some inquiring friend, instead 
of coming to their work permeated with a sense of the 
true dignhVy and beauty of language, and standing like 
the Prophet clothed with authority over the valley of 
vision r bidding the dry bones come together, and Antiquity 
revivified to walk forth in all its glorious proportions. 

A better day is beginning to dawn for classical and lib- 
eral culture. Society is making larger demands upon 
its educated men. Teaching is fast becoming a profes- 
sion, and the preparation of text-books a philosophical 
study ; — and the children are beginning to run with laugh- 
ter and gladness where the fathers groped with tearful 
eyes and bruised feet. May we soon see the sun of that 
better day arise over Mt. Ida : and when in future years. 



26 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

0" 019 598 397 5 1 



this University shall become in fact as well as position the 
educational Acropolis of your city, 

" Dilectae matris blandae utaminte surgens," 

may you be reminded when each morning gilds its tow- 
ers, and casts its shadow down the slope, and when amid 
the gathering darkness they stand out against the sky, — 
that, as in the ancient legend from the Troy of old went 
forth a band who, in the face of angry gods and unpro- 
pitions fates, through storm, and shipwreck and battle, 
bore the nation's guardian deities at last to the future 
home of empire, — so every year sends forth from among 
you a band of youth thoroughly armed with every element 
of liberal education ; thoroughly disciplined to encounter 
perverted sentiment, ignorance, irreligion, fanaticism; — 
with pure tastes, broad views of life, noble purposes, and 
a vital piety warming and animating the whole, — carrying 
these influences to thousands of households, — to whom 
their Alma Mater pointing with just pride may say as did 
the Roman matron of her sons, " These are my jewels!" 



wnnSLSf. congress 



019 598 397 



Hollinger Corp. 
pH 8.5 



